Getting Started with Mule Cloud Connect

Chapter 2. Cloud Connectors

As with transports, Cloud Connectors can process messages, communicate with a remote system, and be configured as part of a Mule flow. They can take full advantage of Mule’s DSL authoring environment for autocompletion in your favorite IDE or XML editor, offering context-sensitive documentation and access to lists of default and valid values. The main purpose of Mule Cloud Connect is to provide you with an easy way to connect to the thousands of open APIs out there without having to work with transports or dealing with the different protocols that each API uses. Over the following sections we will start to replace transports with Cloud Connectors and discuss in detail how to get up and running with some of the most popular APIs.

Installing Cloud Connectors

To get started with Mule Cloud Connect, you will first need to download the connector you want to use. Most Mule modules, such as the HTTP module we used earlier, are prepackaged with Mule and do not require downloading, but you’ll have to download and install the Cloud Connectors yourself. Each connector and its associated documentation is available at MuleForge, but the steps to download a connector differ slightly depending on your development environment. The following sections detail the most common approaches.

Maven

If you use Apache Maven to build your Mule projects, you can install Cloud Connectors by adding dependency entries for each connector you will be using to your Maven pom.xml file. Each ...